You may have heard of the “contentious” interaction between Republican Clay Higgins and Raya Salter (an environmental lawyer) during a House Oversight & Reform Committee hearing on September 15, 2022. If you really need to see the interaction, I will link to it at the bottom, but just be aware that I’ll cover the meat of the conversation here and that the interaction itself is just ugly, with Higgins sounding like some kind of barely-educated cave troll (despite being a former law professor), Salter mostly just telling him that he needs to get some morals, and Higgins constantly claiming victory though no such thing occurred. Higgins also calls her “boo” a couple of times. Despite all that, there were interesting details about the interaction that bear examining.
Higgins and Salter both attempted to claim that their position had the blessing of Christianity, with Salter imploring Higgins to get right with God in terms of the harm that he is causing human beings by using his position of power to allow the continued poisoning of working class people (especially people of color) by petrochemical companies in his state (Louisiana). The reason toxic petrochemical release from factories affects people of color more than white people is because there are very long term systems of oppression that have both forced people of color to live near industrial areas and placed factories near where people of color live. I expect that Higgins doesn’t care about Black people, so if he “searches his heart” (as Salter put it), he will find nothing.
Higgins’s position regarding Christianity made a lot less sense. He noted that his interpretation of the Bible is that God gave man “dominion” of the Earth, and then he says that the original word in the original language had a meaning closer to “responsibility for taking care of it” which seemed to directly counter his position as a climate change denier. Although, to be clear, it seems like the current position of mainstream climate change deniers in politics is to ignore the issue of whether climate change is real and jump straight to saying that nothing can possibly be done. So it seems like his pointed defining of Biblical dominion was really just there to give himself moral cover, as if to say, “I know that God told me to take care of the Earth, so how dare you accuse me of not taking care of the Earth!” (I think the better response to this kind of incomplete argument is to say, “Well, then why aren’t you doing what God told you to do, ass?”)
Higgins also accused Salter of having “no answers” when it comes to what to do about climate change and the affect of toxic petrochemicals on human beings — implying that there are no answer to be had. This is an approach typical to people who want to defend the status quo, be they Republicans like Higgins, or Democrats like Hillary Clinton: They reduce the issue in such a way to imply that we can either do nothing or an extremely disruptive solution must be implemented all at once. In the case of Higgins, he recited a very long list of objects that are manufactured using materials created from petrochemicals and then demanded that Salter explain how all of these things could be replaced. This was an obvious trap, and Salter wisely did not take the bait. This kind of argument is a variant of the “Gish Gallop” — each of the products mentioned by Higgins is meant to become it’s own separate argument, and then each element of an alternative production strategy for that product can become a separate argument as well. It instantly becomes such a big conversation that it would take a week to complete — but Salter only had a few minutes.
I’m no fan of capitalism; however, I can tell you that a capitalist production process for any product can adapt to changes in the availability of any given resource given enough time. No Democratic Party politician is advocating for all fossil fuels to be banned at once, or even for all passenger cars to be replaced with electrics at once. Democrats are conservatives, after all, but at least have some kind of vague understanding that capitalism itself is in danger from climate change — and they want to conserve capitalism by making extremely slow changes to how it functions.
To get back to Salter vs. Higgins, the Salter position is that we can make slow change to resource availability and it will not break capitalism. Higgins’s position is that only immediate and complete change is available as an option, and that would clearly break capitalism. My problem with this framing of the argument is that Higgins is slightly more correct. As I said before, capitalism can adapt to slow change in the availability of any resource, but that isn’t what is required. Because human civilization has put off these changes for well over 50 years, it is now too late to avert catastrophe. The issue now is how many people will die, and the more slowly we make changes, the more people will perish.
Breaking capitalism through rapid change is now a moral imperative. Yes, the climate change science continues to say, “If we act now, we can keep the Earth below 1.5C of warming,” yet the detail of the word “act” has become more and more dramatic to the point that it is no longer possible to do the things that “act” encompasses without disrupting capitalism, and that disruption, in and of itself, will have to be so great and so significant that it will also be harmful to people. The more optimistic advocates of change are trying to tell us that we need to shift the burden of this extreme disruption in such a way that fewer people die — by severely disrupting the comfort and convenience of the relatively wealthy (e.g., most Americans). They de-emphasize the disruption of comfort and convenience because they know that their audience is immoral and would rather let most of the world die than give up their little luxuries.
I’ll quote Kai Heron from their Twitter:
I’ve said this before, but ecological politics today isn’t about ‘saving the planet’ or ‘solving the climate crisis’ as we used to be told. It isn’t even about staying within 1.5C of planetary heating. That’s over. It’s gone. Ecological politics is about limiting how many people die, how many are displaced, how many experience insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it’s about how many species and habitats will be lost forever. This shift in our understanding is important for a couple of reasons. First, it defeats the ‘it’s already too late’ doomer crowd. Yes, it is too late. That’s why we should act. Second, it moves beyond narratives about how we have 12 years, 10 years, or three years, to act. Every decision made today that takes us further away from decarbonization, like the UK’s decision to pursue fracking, or the US and Europe’s subsidization of fossil fuels and refusal to grant reparations to the periphery, tips the scales towards greater death and destruction.
I hope you will re-read that to gain the complete nuance. An apocalyptic level of climate change is now locked in, but that apocalypse becomes worse with every passing day that we do nothing. Since vehicle electrification and renewable energy production is being used to bolster economic growth rather than to replace fossil fuel use, we are continuing to do nothing, and it should be obvious that the Democrats’ slow change plan never seriously considered the science behind climate change; they, too, are climate change deniers in their own way. Yes, it is theoretically possible that some amazing technology solves the problem, but that isn’t happening — no such technology exists or is expected to exist in the near future. There are claims of such technology, but so far, all have been revealed as vaporware.
I’ll remind you that even though destruction of the Earth might be “part of God’s plan”, if you are advocating for that destruction to occur, you are going to Hell just like any murderer whose crimes were also “part of God’s plan”. You cannot be forgiven while you are still in the process of sinning against God, and participating in the destruction of Creation is just that.
Agape School in Missouri has been closed down after the state of Missouri was able to confirm 10 stories of abuse. According to the Missouri Independent:
The Christian reform school in Stockton faces mounting accusations of abuse, lawsuits and calls for its closure by former students, who described being physically restrained, sexually abused, starved as a form of punishment and taken off prescribed medications while reassured that “God would fix them.”
OK, so this isn’t just a school, it is a Christian school, and it isn’t just a Christian school, but an “evangelical” school (specifically “Baptist”). A school set up by far right extremists, meant to receive boys suffering from behavioral problems (most likely as a result of abuse by their parents), and then abuse them some more, apparently. Some of the boys were brought to the “school” to be “reformed” illegally:
Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that Julio Sandoval, former dean of Agape Boarding School and owner of a transport business to bring children to boarding schools, was indicted for violating a protection order. He allegedly arranged for a boy to be transported from Fresno, California to Stockton, Missouri against his will.
Yes, not only does there appear to be a pattern of systematically abusing boys (Daily Beast article) at this institution, but at least some of the boys were stolen from their custodial parent by an abusive parent working with the head of the “school”. This article only cites one case (the one that got the guy arrested) but it sounds like this was a service that they provided abusive parents generally (he was the “owner of a transport business to bring children to boarding schools”). If you’re wondering if the abuse might just be the normal abuse conservatives feel is a necessary part of child rearing, it was not:
To qualify as abuse in a preponderance of evidence claim, the following five criteria must be met: The alleged victim was under 18 at the time of the reported incident, the alleged perpetrator was responsible for the care and custody of the alleged victim; there was a physical injury, sexual abuse, and/or emotional abuse; the injury was not accidental; and, the physical injury was “not the result of spanking” or other forms of discipline “administered in a reasonable manner.”
None of these abusers were Satanists. None of them were trans. No atheists or Muslims were involved, either. The conservative moral panic regarding child abuse has two purposes: 1) To villainize their (innocent) enemies, and 2) To deflect blame away from themselves for the crimes they and their fellow conservatives continue to commit.
…the legend of the Alamo is a Texas tall tale run amok. The actual story is one of White American immigrants to Texas revolting in large part over Mexican attempts to end slavery. Far from heroically fighting for a noble cause, they fought to defend the most odious of practices.
Yeah, I know. Is there anything from America’s noble history that the woke mob isn’t willing to destroy with facts? If America wanted to have a truly noble history, it should have behaved nobly in the first place.
While we are on the subject of historical things that Americans are told to never forget, but that are factually very different from the version we’re supposed to remember, let’s talk about 9/11, that modern defeat that inspired so many glorious victories for Christian nationalism and neoliberal capitalism. Before I get into it, I need to emphasize to you that those terrorist attacks were quite simply wrong; I’ll get into why. We can all agree on that detail.
MOTIVE
Both Christian nationalists and neoliberal capitalists were quick to declare that the terrorists were motivated by their hatred for our “freedom”. In reality, their grievances against the United States were identical to the grievances that Christian nationalists have against the US government, and include both religious/ethnic grievances and socioeconomic grievances.
Most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, which has a very special relationship with the US government and the American empire.
After World War 2, the US was the only major economy still functioning well; this fact, plus the fact that the US dollar was backed with gold, made it easy for the world to decide that the US dollar would be the international currency of choice. Then, in 1971, Nixon unilaterally decided to unlink the value of the dollar from gold, which created economic instability. Nixon then made that deal with the devil (in this case, the House of Saud) that they would require everyone to buy their oil with US dollars in exchange for the US protecting them no matter how they treated people in Saudi Arabia. In response to the oil shocks of 1974-75, the US government expanded this plan and by 1975, all OPEC oil was sold in US dollars.
Side note: The main reason the US government hates Iran is probably because they keep threatening to sell their oil in their own currency instead of US dollars, not because of any human rights abuses. Economics are the primary tool of US hegemony, but economic power is always backed up with violence, i.e., the enormous US military.
This agreement is extremely beneficial to the royal family of Saudi Arabia, but allows them to oppress the Saudi Arabian people as much as they want, and Saudi Arabians understand that the United States is the power behind the Saudi throne oppressing them economically. Moreover, Saudi Arabians are aware of the “degenerate” way westerners live, at least partially because western corporations are always trying to colonize their country, and doing so through the promotion of western culture (especially western media). The result is that they experience constant culture shock in their own country.
Does this sound familiar? It should. These are exactly the same grievances that American conservatives have: The wrong people have all the economic power and are impoverishing them, while promoting a rapidly changing culture that is more and more degenerate. Conservatives are very similar wherever you find them even if their narratives are very different — even if they hate each other for their differences.
Let me just emphasize: These grievances are real in both cases! There really is material harm going on, and there really is a rapid change in culture that is dismaying to conservatives — in both cases. However, their solution to these problems (in both cases) isn’t liberty, but rather oppression that has been given a thin veneer of moral goodness. When conservatives say “freedom” they mean their freedom to force others to comply with their particular conservative culture.
From the perspective of a person who values actual democracy and has the ability to empathize with others, both groups of conservatives are clearly the bad guys. While the harm is real, their solutions are horrifying and both groups have killed Americans in pursuit of those sinister goals. The radical Muslims that executed the 9/11 attacks are really no different from our own radical Christians, and yet Christian nationalists in the US see Islam as part of the army of Satan (literally) and Islamic radicals see the US as a component of “the Great Satan”.
In September of 2001, I was a normal American in the sense that I was blissfully unaware of what was going on in the world, and didn’t even watch the news much less try to get beyond the news media to find the truth. When the 9/11 attacks happened, I was at work, and everything ground to a halt as we brought up the footage of the Twin Towers getting hit. It was extremely surprising and traumatizing. I at least knew enough about international politics to suspect that it might have been Muslim terrorists, but the majority of Americans were completely dismayed at why anyone would want to attack the US in such a horrific way.
HARM
The targets of the 9/11 attacks were the World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and the White House. These were all obvious symbols of the real oppression that the Saudi Arabian attackers experience; moreover, they were practical targets. Destroying them materially affected the cultural and economic war going on between western Christian nationalism and neoliberal capitalism on one side, and the Muslim world on the other side. Moreover, New York City is functionally the capital of capitalism. The narrative that these were random targets who had done nothing against the attackers is absurd, but it worked well on the largely ignorant US population.
Why did American conservatives care? US conservatives actively hate New York City. They are actively trying to figure out how to overthrow the US government and have been since the 1970’s. You’d think they’d be celebrating the 9/11 attacks, like they celebrated the Oklahoma City bombing. The difference between Oklahoma City and 9/11 is that Christian nationalists were the perpetrators of Oklahoma City. The conservative problem with 9/11 isn’t the death, the destruction, or the choice of targets, but only that it was a symbolic domination of white American Christians by brown foreign Muslims.
In terms of the material harm, the number of victims of 9/11 is officially 2,996 but the odds are high that more people will ultimately die from exposure to the dust created by the destruction of the buildings in New York City, and over 1000 have already been diagnosed with conditions that are likely related to that exposure. This was the highest death toll of any terrorist attack in US history, with the Oklahoma City bombing coming in a distant second place. It was also the greatest destruction of infrastructure in the US by a terrorist attack. (I have to wonder if the American far right is jealous of how effective the attack was.)
But let’s look at COVID-19.
When US officials first figured out that a pandemic was underway, they proposed a lockdown, but “essential” workers kept going to work. The US didn’t even make a serious effort to stop international travel (unlike the complete shutdown of flying that happened after 9/11). Most importantly, conservatives chose to completely ignore the lockdown and the modest requests the government made in terms of masking and social distancing. As a result of all this, the US has had an extremely high per capita death rate due to COVID-19 — about 3000 people have died per million so far, which is well over a million people.
Again, the death toll for 9/11 was 3000 people. The number of people killed by COVID-19 as a direct result of conservative jackassery far exceeds this number. There have been points during this pandemic where one 9/11 of people were dying every day from COVID-19. Certainly, some of those deaths were unavoidable, but I think it is fair to say that we should have been able to keep the death rate at close to 1000 per capita (Canada, for example, was able to do this), or more like 350k people total. That means conservatives (and I do include neoliberal capitalists who were more concerned about the economy of wealthy people than human lives) caused something like 650,000 American deaths.
That’s not the only way US conservatives kill other Americans. The domestic policies they insist on in terms of maintaining poverty (even punishing the poor!) and withholding adequate medical care are deadly and they know it. About 91,000 deaths per year can be attributed to social factors in the US; these are all a direct consequence of conservative policies that value the maintenance of hierarchies over human lives.
From these population-attributable fraction estimates and mortality data, we estimated that approximately 245 000 deaths in the United States in 2000 were attributable to low education, 133 000 to poverty, 162 000 to low social support, 39 000 to area-level poverty, 119 000 to income inequality, and 176 000 to racial segregation.
Moreover, Americans kill people in other countries all the time — not because we were materially harmed but just to keep those people under the domination of this unholy partnership between neoliberal capitalism and Christian nationalism. For example, after 9/11, the US didn’t attack Saudi Arabia (even though the terrorists were almost all from there) but instead used the attacks as a flimsy excuse to attack Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the war against Iraq, over a million people died. Direct deaths caused by violence were around 150k, and the rest were indirect deaths caused by the complete disruption of the entire country. The US lost 4507 soldiers in this conflict.
In the war against Afghanistan, about 200k people died. The US lost 2420 soldiers in this conflict.
Again, 9/11 only killed about 3000 Americans. In relation to the death and destruction caused by US conservatism manifested in domestic idiocy as well as the ongoing domination of the rest of the world using a combination of coercive economic force and the overpowered US military, the 9/11 attacks were insignificant. Even if we only count deaths of Americans, 9/11 is insignificant. Even if we only count deaths of US soldiers, 9/11 is insignificant.
PROPAGANDA
In light of the facts (that the 9/11 attacks were wholly immoral and yet inspired by legitimate grievances and that the actual harm of 9/11 was small relative to the ongoing harm caused by American conservatives), why do we still care about 9/11? The answer is that 9/11 has become an important part of the conservative propaganda machine — yet another tool for promoting mindless nationalism rather than patriotism. This aids the fascist side (white supremacists and Christian nationalists) the most, but it helps near-right neoliberal capitalists as well.
In short, whatever legitimate trauma we experienced as a nation over the 9/11 attacks (and I do feel that personally), it is time to let it go because 9/11 became a propaganda tool for harm and domination. The primary reason conservatives squeal so much about people discarding these symbols of nationalism is that it means they are less able to enjoy their historic domination of society. They don’t actually give a shit about anyone who died as a result of 9/11 except maybe the cops and firefighters, but I doubt that they are sincere about even that. Remember that they love to fawn over US soldiers as well, but then refuse to spend any money on their health and well-being after they complete their service, and recall how they used US flags to beat the police during the January 6 insurrection. We need to throw all this conservative propaganda in the trash so that the vulgar truth of conservatism can be laid bare.
THE TRUE MEANING OF 9/11
In light of all that, what is the best way to think of the 9/11 attacks?
Terrorists seem to universally come to the conclusion that everyone is guilty, and that justifies the randomness of their victims. The victims are “fungible” — meaning that the whole class of people are seen as guilty with no consideration for what any individual victim has actually done in their life. The 9/11 terrorists saw all Americans as guilty. Similarly, McVeigh and Nichols saw all government employees as guilty. Dylann Roof saw all Black people as guilty. Omar Mateen saw all LGBTQ people as guilty. This view is fundamentally immoral, amounting to execution without trial or evidence. It is the genocidal point of view shared by all fascists.
The 9/11 attacks were an opportunity to learn, but America failed to do that. The true meaning of 9/11 — particularly as it relates to the recurring quasi-holiday that it has become — is a monument to the willful, hateful ignorance and corrosive selfishness of Americans. That monument isn’t something to be celebrated; like the deaths caused by the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, it is something to be mourned.
Just now, I see that popular sentiment has pressured Biden to ask for Democrats to end the filibuster in order to put the right to abortion into law. I don’t think that nullifies the overall spirit of this post and I don’t think it will make one lick of difference in the long term, but please keep in mind that I wrote all this before that happened.
In the wake of the horrifying Supreme Court decision against women’s rights last week, there are (predictably) many Democrats encouraging people to vote. “Vote blue no matter who” is the popular phrasing. It is worthwhile, then, to try to understand what the current state of electoral politics in the US is.
First off, we know that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 Presidential election. I know you twitched involuntarily and started to ask me what crazy fantasy I’m living in, but the fact of the matter is that she won the election, but wasn’t awarded the presidency because the electoral system rigs our republic to favor the conservative candidate and hand that person the office against the wishes of the American people. Moreover, I can tell you that many leftists voted for her despite hating her and the other neoliberal trash that the Democratic Party keeps pushing on us. If you look at the actual election turnout data, you can see that Democratic party turnout was very good — better than Republican turnout. Leftists did turn out for the 2016 election, and they did turn out for the 2020 election; the narrative that we’re in this predicament with the Supreme Court because the left wouldn’t “vote blue no matter who” is false.
The electoral college (an inherently and intentionally anti-democratic institution) is a huge problem. If your Democratic Party representatives are not actively opposed to the existence of the electoral college, they bear some of the responsibility for the mess we’re in now. The combination of the electoral college and the internal functioning of the two main parties (but the Democrats in particular) are the reason why the US is an anocracy. In addition, there’s the two-party system dynamic which is apparently very hard to break.
The problem with “vote blue no matter who” is that the “who” is most generally a conservative. Joe Biden, in particular, is obviously a conservative; he’s clearly anti-choice. The Democratic Party uses the cartoonish villainy of the Republicans as a constant threat against the left, basically saying, “If you don’t support me, I won’t be able to stop that monster from getting you.” In the case of Biden, they like to say he’s had a “long evolution” but that’s not really true; rather, what’s true is that he had to change his tune in order to qualify as a candidate for President. His actual views didn’t change — he was just willing to mute those views in exchange for a shot at the presidency. That’s why he isn’t aggressively tackling the Supreme Court’s abortion decision today. Right now, he’s literally making a deal with Mitch McConnell to give an anti-abortion conservative a federal judgeship in return for Mitch saying he won’t obstruct other appointees.
My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known.
Joe Biden
I can tell you now that I was mistaken during most of the 2016 and 2020 primary processes. My thinking was that the Trumpers were going to vote Trump no matter what, meanwhile the Democrats would vote for whoever won the nomination, and that the “burn it all down” people (those unhinged, undecided people) would vote for Sanders if he were the nominee because Sanders was clearly a better person than Trump. Certainly, the left would turn out for Sanders — though many correctly saw him as a centrist rather than a leftist. Then, during the week that it looked like Sanders would win the 2020 primary, I realized that many of these “vote blue no matter who” people had absolutely no intention of voting for Bernie Sanders in the general election. I only realized this because some of them took off their mask and told me flat out: If Sanders won the primary, they would stay home during the general election.
“Vote blue no matter who” is a lie.
While I still think that the Democratic Party’s strategy of standing just left of the Republican Party is impractical (and I’ll explain that further down), I do now see that it isn’t completely insane. Americans are — on the average — conservative and they have absolutely no solidarity; they are trash. (I’m not sure what a person would be like if they were a conservative with solidarity, but my suspicion is that they’d be a leftist because solidarity means democracy and the left is democracy.) In this context, it makes sense to stand just to the left of the Republicans no matter how far right they go, but it does assume a two-dimensional political spectrum and that this strategy will grant you all votes to the left of your position.
It seems like these are the relevant voting blocks in the US:
Conservative Democrats — these people steer the Democratic Party with their donations and votes. They say that they don’t like [obviously bad things] but oppose all significant change because it might make them materially and mentally uncomfortable. Includes pantsuit feminists. They pretend to agree with social democrats and leftists on many issues, but then block action, usually by just shrugging and saying, “It isn’t practical.” That’s because they don’t really support trans people, abortion rights, a livable climate, equitable treatment of Black people, but they pretend they do — usually. They’re always considering which group or issue to sacrifice to hold on to their lifestyle. They all say, “Vote blue no matter who!” but if they had to choose between a Republican and a Democratic Socialist for President, many would prefer a John-McCaine-style Republican over the Democratic Socialist, or might just not vote.
Social Democrats/Democratic Socialists — the centrists, including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Willing to put up with the continued existence of a parasitic capitalist class as long as things are “more fair”. “Tax the rich!” These people truly vote blue no matter who; they’re the only people on this list who do.
The Actual Left — cite actual history to suggest that the social democrats might be willing to throw them under the bus, and they understand clearly that conservative democrats are the (lesser) enemy. Can sometimes be convinced to vote if something has gone horribly wrong (e.g., Trump); might not vote for the Democrat.
Confused Conservatives — don’t understand that the Democratic Party is controlled by conservatives; think that it is controlled by communists or something. Still believe that they can win back the Republican party. Lincoln Project people. Always vote; mostly vote Republican but might consider voting Democrat given all this fascism going on.
Christofascists — believe Jesus wants them to conquer the planet, planning to genocide all the “Satanists” (anyone who isn’t a Christofascist), support Israel but also plan to kill every Jewish person that won’t convert to Christianity. Many of them are also neonazis. Reliably vote for the Republican.
Neonazis — your standard racist psychos, absolutely willing to latch onto any political position that gives them more power, planning to genocide all the “non-whites” including all Jewish people. Many of them are also Christofascists, but almost all of them pretend to be Christians. Reliably vote for the Republican, but a bit less reliable than the Christofascists.
Burn It Down People — hate politics, but don’t understand them, will vote in whichever way makes powerful people the most uncomfortable. Voted for Obama, but also Trump. More likely to vote if one of the candidates is disruptive to the status quo. Not likely to vote for any particular party.
Nonvoters — simply too mentally lazy to get involved in the whole thing, pretend that not voting is a matter of moral hygiene. Is political ignorance a noble virtue or do you just have your head completely up your own ass?
Essentially, the Democratic Party strategy is to make sure not to lose any conservative democrats and they think they can provide information to confused conservative Republican voters that will help them to understand that the Republican party is now fascist, which would make voting Democrat the logical choice. They assume that democratic socialists and the actual left will vote Democrat and don’t concern themselves with making them happy at all. They seem to deny the existence of burn it down people and nonvoters. They know there are fascists, but won’t say so because they are afraid pointing it out explicitly will alienate confused conservatives and give both democratic socialists and actual left voters leverage. The Democratic Party is more afraid of the center and the left than it is of fascism.
The proof of this is in the news:
…lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have suggested Biden limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction or expand its membership, end the legislative “filibuster” rule, build abortion clinics on federal lands, declare a national emergency and establish Planned Parenthood outposts outside U.S. national parks, among other options. … Biden and officials are concerned that more radical moves would be politically polarizing ahead of November’s midterm elections, undermine public trust in institutions like the Supreme Court or lack strong legal footing, sources inside and outside the White House say.
Perhaps it isn’t obvious: They’re concerned about “political polarization” because they think it will cost them votes — conservative democrat and confused conservative votes.
The upshot of their strategy is that they can never actually win, and in fact, by constantly choosing appeasement of fascism, the Democratic Party’s strategy constantly moves the country further to the right. It allows the Republican Party to actually do what their constituents want, which is to implement far-right laws, and then the Democratic Party obliges them by stepping to the right as well — but just to their left. This is not “practical”. If practical means winning, then practical is doing the right thing, and doing it with transparency.
We know that the fascists are 30% of eligible voters, and we know that the Democratic Party candidate must beat the Republican Party candidate by 4 percentage points to win the electoral college. The question, then, is how does the Democratic Party candidate reliably beat the Republican by 4% of the popular vote? What coalition of voter groups is required to accomplish that? We know that a conservative democrat (e.g., Biden) can win against a known fascist (Trump in 2020) but cannot win against a cryptofascist (Trump in 2016). What we don’t know is whether Democratic Party conservativism/faux-impotence (and the resulting voter fatigue) will dissuade voters from returning to the polls to vote against Trump (and his surrogates) in 2022 and 2024.
My guess is that if the Democratic Party were to embrace democratic socialists and the left, they would also gain the burn it down people. They would lose a small percentage of conservative democrats in the process, but I don’t think that would be as devastating as they imagine — particularly since the Republicans have gone so far to the right and have actively promoted insurrection. Any conservative democrats that were lost would re-enter the Republican Party and moderate it, which would alienate both types of fascists. Would this work? Well, it has been working great for Republicans. They never worry about freaking out the moderate voters, and they’ve been making steady progress for over 40 years.
The average American is not well-informed and has a very simple model of politics. In short, they believe that the President controls everything — like a king — and that the President’s party are his minions. They are blaming gasoline prices (and inflation overall) entirely on Joe Biden and have no understanding of the dynamics of a capitalist economy. For example, I had a waitress tell me yesterday that the reason a Burger King whopper meal costs $10 is because of Joe Biden. The Democrat Party cannot win congressional seats in the midterms or even expect to beat the Republican Presidential candidate in 2024 without throwing iconic representatives of the Democratic Party’s current conservative democrat stance under the proverbial bus (e.g., Biden, Pelosi and perhaps Hillary Clinton). Moreover, that’s what those people deserve for 40 years of failure to do the right thing.
That is the practical way forward for the Democratic Party. If it fails, they really won’t be in a significantly worse position than they’re in now — they’ve already lost because the fascists control the Supreme Court. If this is not the solution, then there is no electoral solution. On that note: By 2024 — or perhaps even by this November — the Republicans may have rigged the entire system to make it impossible for Democrats (or any other party) to control any part of the federal government through an electoral process.
Some of our members have received a flier in the mail from a Lee’s Summit area politician who is running for the fourth district seat in the US House of Representatives. He says that he is running for “Congress,” presumably to keep from confusing his constituents with the details of how the US government works; it’s extremely vague, but accurate. Boone County (including all of Columbia) is part of the fourth district, as is a huge amount of rural territory, which effectively eliminates the influence of liberal Columbia on the choice of Representative for the fourth district. The fourth district reaches all the way to the Kansas border, and stops just south of Lee’s Summit. (Looks like the candidate probably lives in or near Harrisonville.)
The flier is a treasure trove of today’s fascist dog whistles. A dog whistle calls out to an entire body of knowledge, making it an excellent form of communication — and also extremely hard to counter. To counter a dog whistle, you have to counter the entire body of knowledge it represents. Of course, I’m not saying that Bill Irwin is a fascist; I’m just commenting on the fact that the content of this flier is extremely similar to what a fascist would say.
Irwin is “the fighter”. Coincidentally, fascists always portray themselves as under attack, even though, typically, they are the ones attacking and any kind of politics aimed against them is typically defensive. As an example, the whole reason Pride month (with the barrage of pro-LGBTQ+ events and messaging) exists is specifically because LGBTQ+ people were being victimized by fascists (still happening), and yet, fascists still try to turn this around and say that Pride (and all it encompasses) somehow makes them into victims. If people didn’t want to hear about LGBTQ+ people so much, they could have just not attacked them in the first place.
There are seven major points on the front of this flier. Let’s take a look at each of them. The order won’t be the same as it is on the flier.
Preserving Our Constitutional Freedoms
According to the flier, “The radical left is waging an all-out assault on our freedoms. I swore an oath to defend our constitution from enemies foreign and domestic. I will not back down from this fight.” Neat. OK, first off, there are no representatives of the radical left anywhere in the US government. It’s not clear who he would be referring to, but based on the information on his website and information about the church he attends (Abundant Life in Lee’s Summit), we can see that he subscribes to the “one-world government” conspiracy theory wherein Satanists (who in other places have also been described as socialists, Jews, and other hobgoblins of the far-right mind) are secretly manipulating things to create an anti-Christian, united world government that will treat white people the way they have historically treated everyone else. This would be the Christian version of the one-world government conspiracy theory, but there’s very significant overlap with the racist version.
In truth, the globalists fighting for control of the world, minimizing the power of individuals, and impairing democracy at every turn are… capitalists. They have nothing to do with the left. However, when you’re standing on the far right edge of the map, everything else probably seems like the extreme left.
On his website, Irwin identifies the First and Second Amendments to the US Constitutions as representing freedoms that are under threat from these supposed radical leftists.
From the perspective of the far right, the First Amendment is under threat because market forces are working to convince corporations (and, more importantly, the capitalists who own them) to marginalize far-right opinions and culture. The fascists want those corporations to be required to allow fascists to use their private property (e.g., social networking websites) to promote their ideas (including genocide).
While anti-discrimination laws are Constitutional, the interesting detail here is that you can’t use anti-discrimination logic to force a publishing platform to promote discrimination. You also can’t use it to force a publishing platform to promote lies, falsehoods, or violence. The First Amendment protects the right of Christians to promote Christianity on Facebook, for example, but not to promote the idea that liberals are pedophilic crypto-Satanists who drink the blood of babies, and therefore must be killed. Fascists understand this, and that’s why they convert their introductory-level ideas to vague narratives that can’t be clearly identified as genocidal.
As a leftist pro-gun organization, we clearly sympathize with Irwin’s concern about his Second Amendment rights. However, the way the left sees the Second Amendment is fundamentally different from how fascists see it. The left is about punching up — the weak defending themselves against the powerful. In contrast, the right is about punching down — attacking the weak before they can get organized enough to defend themselves or take control.
In either case, they are going to need military weapons to do it; that is the essence of how they see the Second Amendment. As was the case with the January 6 insurrectionists and the murderer in Buffalo, they assume that most of the military and police will be on their side (they might be right; Irwin is former military, for example). Most of them live outside of urban areas and literally believe that there will be some Event that will start the Apocalypse, and then dark-skinned people will stream out of the cities into the surrounding suburbs and rural areas to murder everyone. Someone tried to make a joke about this on Twitter in 2017, and it got entirely out of hand because the joke perfectly corresponded with what “conservatives” actually believe.
Break Up Woke Corporations
Our capital-controlled society has decided that a corporation is a person and just as the far right would execute actual human people who oppose their ideology, they of course also would execute corporations who oppose their ideology. The way we execute a corporation is by destroying its legal existence — breaking it up or decorporating it. The far right goal is that any legal person who refuses to support the far right agenda will be executed. Those that support the far right agenda would probably get some nice federal handouts.
Maintain America as THE Superpower
In 2021, the USA spent almost 3 times as much as the nation in second place on the military. Specifically, the US spent over $800 billion, and second place went to China at $293 billion. In third place is India at just under $77 billion. China’s increase in military spending is certainly a great indication that they intend to do something horrible in the next decade (it was closer to a quarter of US military spending in 2012), but the US still eclipses its military might. Right wingers always claim to be opposed to government spending, but that really means they are opposed to any kind of government spending on kindness — that is the fruit of the devil. They’re always happy to support more government spending on suffering as well as tax cuts for the wealthy, and that is reflected in the fact that the US government always has a bigger deficit when right wingers control it.
Fiscal Responsibility & Accountability
The flier says, “In times like these, politicians and bureaucrats should do more with less. I will oppose all new taxes and only vote for budgets that cut frivolous spending.” Basically, he’s promising to cut the social safety net as much as he can. In terms of economic outcome, money cut from the social safety net means less spending by people because rich people hoard most of their money while poor people (and even the middle class) spend almost all their money. Less spending hurts the economy. Money trickles up, not down. If you want to help the economy, you’ve got to put more cash in the pockets of people who have less.
Right wingers don’t really want to help the economy; they want their enemies to suffer above all else. We can predict that he will also vote to cut taxes on the wealthy (see below) and increase military spending (see above) even if it isn’t fiscally responsible to do those things. Ultimately, this kind of thinking would lead to the functions of the US government being replaced with either a kind of theocratic monarchy or a corporate feudalism; the former is what the US far right wants.
Far right Christians support cutting taxes on the wealthy because they believe in a variant of Calvinism that says that our economic successes are a reflection of how much God favors us, and that a secular government interfering in that natural order (via taxation or regulation) is anathema. The so-called “prosperity gospel” is a variant of this idea. The economic ideas of Calvinism directly oppose the ideas of Jesus Christ who said:
I’ll say it again-it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of A needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!
Matthew 19:24
Many of today’s Christians find Christ’s teaching against the wealthy to be off-putting. First, they would really like to be wealthy. Second, having no earthly indicator of your odds of getting into the Kingdom of God is very inconvenient and a source of much anxiety. The Calvinist view of economics solves both of these problems by 1) letting you be wealthy as long as you keep claiming to be a Christian and 2) allowing your wealth to indicate how likely it is that you’ll go to Heaven. Note, though, that for non-Christians, your degree of wealth becomes an indicator of how evil you are, and how likely that you are in congress with Satan.
Secure Our Border
The flier says, “Foreign drug cartels should be treated as terrorist organizations. I will vote to build the wall and equip law enforcement to rid our communities of these criminals.” It should be clear that he’s talking about our border with Mexico, not the border with Canada. Immigrants coming across our border with Mexico are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens, but they are more likely to have brown skin. They take the necessary jobs that don’t pay enough for US citizens, like farm labor, and then the people that hire them pretend they did the work themselves.
The flier makes it sound like all the people coming across our southern border are associated with drug cartels, which is preposterous, but it prompts certain questions. Why would we treat drug cartels as terrorists when they don’t do terrorism? Is it because we are racist? Are we just going to call everything that we don’t like terrorism? Can we treat the US churches who promote domestic terrorism as terrorists instead? How can we build the wall — which would cost something like $400 billion (that’s a guesstimate; finding hard figures on this seems nearly impossible [source]) — and still be “fiscally responsible”?
The guns flowing south through the US-Mexico border are much more harmful to Mexico than the drugs flowing north through it. Moreover, the wall has been demonstrated over and over again to be ineffective. Fascists are always happy to spend more money attacking the people they hate and don’t really care about fiscal responsibility or even practicality.
Rebuild American Energy Independence
The logical way to rebuild American energy independence would be to end our dependence on oil, and switch to renewables that don’t have to be shipped in from other countries. That isn’t what the far right means by energy independence, though, because renewables are somehow a plot by Satanists rather than a gift from God from the perspective of the far right. The far right wants to increase the rate that we are extracting oil and other fossil fuels from the US and its territories. It’s not clear whether Irwin would be in support of nationalizing that oil or even simply requiring that any fuel extracted in the US is also sold in the US, which is certainly not the case now (in 2021, corporations exported 2.9 million barrels of oil per day and imported 6.11 million barrels of oil per day). What’s interesting is how propaganda from big oil has become part of the religious right’s anti-commie worldview.
Restore Traditional Christian Values
Interestingly, this point is not on his website! Perhaps, he doesn’t want evil liberals to google him and find out that he is a Christian dominionist, and he probably wants to court the votes of libertarians by making it less clear what exactly he’s up to. By leaving out the details, he creates a Rorschach test where the reader can project their own ideas onto him. The website even says that he wants to, “Allow every American to worship God as they choose.” What if they want to do that in a non-Christian way? What if my god is named Brigid and not Jesus?
Irwin’s church (Abundant Life in Lee’s Summit) is a Christian millenarian sect hoping for Christ to establish his dominion (their word) on Earth as soon as possible. They believe there’s a literal war for dominion of Earth going on and that Lucifer is literally leading the bad side of the war. It seems like they’re using part of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as actual theology, but I’m not certain. “The reason we look around today and see the chaos and confusion and the destruction is because there are two kingdoms that are colliding. Two kingdoms of opposition and they’re in a place of collision,” according to the head minister of the church.
One of those kingdoms is God’s (which is obviously represented by Abundant Life church) and the other of those kingdoms is Satan’s. Satan wants to be worshiped as God and steal His throne. We (the people in this room, he implies) are going to see the prophecies of the End Times fulfilled any day now. Some of us are pretty old, so this must be happening very, very soon. The Bible is like a giant puzzle and you have to project your opinion of reality onto it to understand what it really means, he says — but also, he will tell you what it really means if you just hold on a sec.
Islam seeks worldwide dominion (according to Abundant Life, but also according to many Muslims — it’s no different from Christianity in that way), but Muslims are also ripe for conversion to Christianity. At Abundant Life, they’re clear on their desire to convert Muslims to Christianity; they even travel to predominantly Muslim nations to convert people. The war isn’t a three-sided affair, though — the war for the world is between the forces of God and the forces of Satan and Islam is part of the forces of Satan. Again, this is directly from the head minister guy at Abundant Life. (Yes, I’m watching one of their horrible videos for you.) Now, if you stop a random Muslim on the street, I’m pretty sure they’ll be in strong disagreement — I’m pretty sure they’ll say that Islam is the side of God.
Specifically, the guy at Abundant Life is saying that Islam is the Fourth Beast (with it’s ten kings; are there 10 Islamic “kings”?) from Bible prophecy. He pauses his narrative for quite a while to go off on a weird tangent, building up suspense before he drops the bass and tells the assembled crowd this. Satan is behind the scenes, see, “pulling the strings” so the forces of evil might not even know that they are working for Satan! Abundant Life appears to be a dispensational premillennialist church, meaning that they believe in a literal seven-year tribulation; in essence, the “Left Behind” books are a better representation of their beliefs than the actual Bible. He notes that some Bible Scholars think the EU is the Fourth Beast, but they’re wrong because Arabs. He seems like he’s talking out of his ass a lot, but this might all be standard LaHayean Christianity at this point. You can watch the whole thing about the Abundant Life take on Muslims here.
What does restoring Christian values mean in the context of this open bigotry and insanity? On his website, Irwin says he would vote to:
Stop the teaching of critical race theory in our schools
Stop the radical gender ideology which is currently permeating our schools
Parents must have a voice and choice in the education of their children
Stop COVID vaccine mandates
Stop mask mandates
You probably know enough about critical race theory to know that they aren’t teaching it in “our schools” (i.e., K-12) and that the far right is just using the CRT label to refer to any situation where a teacher taught an accurate version of important parts of US history, like the part where European Christians invaded the continent and stole the land from the people who already lived here, or the part where Christian Americans took part in the slave trade, literally owned other human beings, and that it took a war to end slavery, and yet horrible treatment of Black Americans continues to this day. In essence, anyone who says we need to stop teaching critical race theory in our schools is a fascist.
The radical gender ideology… is that “permeating” our schools? I have three kids that are in school right now and it seems like they’re just being taught to be nice to people, including LGBTQ+ people. If a kid comes out as trans, they use their new name and pronouns, but that doesn’t count as “permeating” in my book. Let me consult with a child… I’ve just been informed that the teachers never mentioned anything about gaiety or transness to this particular child and that all of the “radical gender ideology” that they experience at school was perpetrated by the children themselves — not anyone who worked for the school. This is interestingly similar to what happens in colleges: very few college instructors are anything close to “radical” — college students are radicalized by other students and through their own independent exploration of the world.
Irwin clearly wants tax dollars to be funneled to religious schools, and he also wants parents to be able to (essentially) vote on the curriculum of the schools.
The whole COVID-19 thing has been a huge issue for far-right Christians, so of course he addresses this. Essentially, they thought that the pandemic was exaggerated for the purpose of empowering the one-world government, and every time the government tried to make them do anything, they imagined this as the hand of Satan trying to gain a permanent increase in domination of their lives. Irwin takes it a step further and promises to vote to force businesses to serve and employ people who refuse to be vaccinated and/or wear a mask; his website says, “We should never have to prove we are vaccinated to attend a concert, visit a restaurant, seek a job, or carry on in our normal life.” Fascists do not respect private property and don’t actually care about capitalism or the free market. (Just so I’m being clear, I don’t care about those things either, but I’m very consistent about that.)
Here’s the thing: Forcing your religion on other people is a form of fascism. You can restore traditional Christian values all you want, but the moment you start using government to restore traditional Christian values, you have become a fascist. I’ve already covered Christian fascists in a previous post, but I’ll say it again: It’s the Christian fascists — not the racist fascists — that are the immediate danger and the rhetorical attacks we’ve used against racists aren’t necessarily going to work. Christian fascists aren’t just a threat to non-Christians; they are even a threat to other Christians through their rigid dividing of people into God’s army or Satan’s army. There is such a thing as the Christian left — and they would end up victims of Christian fascism the same as Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, Buddhism, and, yes, Satanists.
I often find myself reflecting on that poem by Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communists.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I’ve noticed that the far right is constantly switching around the order of who they’re coming for first, and that when society as a whole pushes back on the latest declaration, they simply switch to a new group. With Trump, it started out with “Mexicans” and then he switched to Muslims. Right now, the imminent threat is to LGBTQ+ people and especially trans people. This week there have been a lot of thought leaders on the far right:
calling for trans people to be “rounded up”
calling for people who take children to Pride events or a drag queen story hour to be “rounded up”
declaring the Pride flag to be the flag of “a hostile enemy”
saying that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles or, more specifically, “groomers”
Those first two are obvious genocidal statements. The “flag of a hostile enemy” thing is building a justification for rounding people up; the idea is that it is a hostile enemy, so if you fly that flag, you’re a traitor, and that justifies your incarceration, torture, and execution. Similarly, the constant barrage of pedophilia accusations toward LGBTQ+ people and their allies is a justification for incarcerating, torturing and killing them (never mind that the greatest pedophilia threat to the children of conservatives comes from other conservatives, including family members).
To get back to the content of this political flier, if these people are successful at winning elections, they will be able to commit acts of genocide and it will be legal. The Holocaust was legal. I emphasize this because when the January 6 thing happened, there were just so many smug liberals saying, “Oh, Mike Pence can’t do that because it isn’t legal.” If you have power, you can make it legal. Legal isn’t an interesting issue to a fascist, and it is fully irrelevant if they have control of the government.
The American left is largely focused on racist fascism, and tends to treat racism as both the primary driver of fascism and it’s natural source. That isn’t wrong, but it also is not the way most American fascists are experiencing their own belief system, so it is deficient in terms of coming up with solutions or predicting fascist behavior. Moreover, I suspect that a significant number of American fascists are simply not really racist at all (other than the implicit racism that happens accidentally in a society built on racism).
The Origins of Today’s Christian Fascism
The first anti-socialism movement in the US happened during Reconstruction. It was based on racism; specifically, white landowners sought to break potential solidarity between landless white people and newly freed Black people by suggesting that the government was going to take money from working class whites and give it to Black people. Conservative politicians are still using this theme and this would be part of the racist fascism the left mostly talks about. At this point, educated people were aware of socialism and it wasn’t particularly threatening. Abraham Lincoln was a contemporary of Karl Marx, spoke favorably of socialism, and was even elected after a history of openly supporting socialism.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.
Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
The second anti-socialism movement in the US was the Post-World-War-2 “Red Scare” which was a reaction to the Soviet Union that was encouraged by wealthy people who were still extremely angry about the New Deal (which preceded World War 2). The strategy they used was to lean on the Soviet Union’s state atheism that truly oppressed Christians and required party members to be atheists (this was both morally wrong and a mistake on the part of Russian communists). The wealthy didn’t care about Christianity, but they knew that most Americans did, so they induced a terror in working class Americans by suggesting that Stalin was coming for their immortal souls. State atheism looks a lot like Satanism from the perspective of a devout Christian.
This strategy created a strange union of wealthy capitalists and working class Christians that still exists to this day in the form of the Republican Party. Now, though, the balance of power between terrified Christian fascists and wealthy capitalists (who are technically liberals) has shifted.
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them… There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism”.
Barry Goldwater, 1994
Bill Clinton is a small-government conservative. Similarly, Hillary Clinton is a small-government conservative, and she was a “Goldwater girl“. If fiscal conservativism were really the issue that conservatives care about, they would have loved both Clintons and we wouldn’t see an increase in the federal debt every time conservatives control the federal government. They hated the Clintons not for their fiscal conservativism or their clever racism, but rather they hated them for their secularism — their failure to push Christian identity, values, and policies. Hillary Clinton being a “Goldwater girl” precisely defines her political position in regard to Christian rule of American society. In short, she’s a Satanist! I’m joking, but that’s precisely how the religious right sees her, and it makes a bit of sense for people who live in a binary Christian/anti-Christian world.
As a point of clarification, there is no necessary relationship between socialism and atheism. Karl Marx believed that religion was so often used by the powerful to manipulate people that it should be abolished, but that was easy for him to say because he didn’t have a religion. While he is technically correct that religion is often used as a tool to manipulate people, it can also be a force for good — and Karl Marx is not the final authority on what socialism should be. There are plenty of people who are leftists and also religious, and an objective reading of the life of Christ suggests that God Himself is a leftist. I’d link you to something someone else has written about that, but everything I’m seeing uses the word “liberal” instead of “leftist” which is a confusing mistake; there’s no indication anywhere that God is a liberal (i.e., someone who supports capitalism).
Thanks to this campaign of terror orchestrated by cynical wealthy people and power-hungry preachers, many American Christians have become Christian Dominionists — people who believe that their particular form of Christianity should rule the US just like particular forms of Islam rule certain other nations. Yes, they say, there should be democracy, but only for people who are Christians, and that democracy should conform to their specific Christian values. The logic is that their particular Christian values are correct and that those specific values are required for democracy to work. While this isn’t a new idea, it has become much more popular in the last 50 years, and the meaning of “Christian” has changed from the definition that was popular at the founding of the nation (much more akin to “good person”; Jefferson was a Christian but didn’t believe Jesus was especially divine) to mean a devotion to an apocalyptic metaphysical belief structure.
You could draw a Venn diagram of Christian fascists and racist fascists, and the two circles would certainly overlap. I don’t know what that overlap is, but I’m certain that the Christian fascist circle is much larger than the other one. Certainly, there are racist fascists who call themselves “Christians” but do not believe in the divinity of Christ, or even in God.
Christian Fascism and the US Constitution
There are two specific places where Christian Fascism contacts the US legal structure quite significantly: The First Amendment and the Second Amendment.
The First Amendment provides religious freedom, which dovetails with the assumption of secular (i.e., unaffiliated with religion) government to mean that no major religious or metaphysical view is put above any other from the perspective of the US government. When Christians demand that the Ten Commandments be placed at the state capitol building, actual Satanists can swoop in and demand that Baphomet stand next to it, creating a quandary that has — so far — been solved in a way that continues allowing all religious and metaphysical views something close to equity.
The First Amendment problem, however, is that a corrupted Supreme Court (like the one we have now) could choose to decide that religious freedom in the Constitution was “originally” only meant to apply to Christians. That’s not true — the founders did want to separate religion from government — but you’ve got to keep in mind that the truth doesn’t matter from a fascist view. A decision indicating that freedom of religion only applies to Christians would instantly strip religious freedom away from about 35% of Americans.
The Second Amendment problem is that these Christians who are terrified of Satanists believe that those Satanists are coming for them physically; if that were true, then the military hardware they keep buying would certainly come in handy. They also have come to believe that God is actively allowing horrible things to happen in America because of immoral behavior — especially secularism, gaiety, transness, and abortion. Those things aren’t seen as immoral for any logical reason, but rather because they are violations of God’s plan (i.e., the plan they assume God has) that replace it with chaos. When a school massacre occurs, they don’t see that as a reason to limit weapons — the weapons didn’t cause it, our sins caused it — and they need those weapons to fight the Satanists.
Calls for gun control are interpreted by far-right Christians as an escalation from the forces of Satan. In fact, any time a secular politician does anything, it is interpreted by far-right Christians as an escalation, but gun control is especially egregious because they believe that as soon as the Satanists outlaw the Christians’ guns, the Satanists will start massacring them (meaning that Christians will interpret a gun ban as a reason to start shooting liberals proactively). From a Christian fascist perspective, the citizen militia of the Second Amendment is only made up of Christians because only Christians are citizens and the highest purpose of that militia is to fight against the forces of Satan.
Christian Dominionism is Fascism
Let’s not empathize with them too much, right? There’s no doubt that Christian Dominionism is a type of fascism. Christian Dominionists would strip everyone else of power, then immediately start trying to figure out how to get rid of them. They’d probably declare that their Apocalypse had begun and that wholesale slaughter of their enemies is really the only thing that can possibly be done about this whole Satan problem; they’d point to Revelations enthusiastically — but they’d point to the Left Behind series with even more vigor. Moreover, the murder wouldn’t stop with Muslims, atheists, uppity women, and queer people; next, they’d be after the Mormons, the Christian left — even Catholics would eventually be on the menu.
Despite how egregious the behavior from Christian fascists has become, we are loath to push back against it. First off, we respect religious pluralism and find the idea of criticizing someone’s religious view to be repugnant. Second, we realize that such criticism could easily backfire making it impractical. As a result, both Christian fascists and racist fascists can play the religious freedom card and there’s not much we will do about it, even if that play is absurd in the given context (e.g., if they’re trying to take away someone else’s freedom to live true to their own religious or metaphysical beliefs). Having said that, the crucial difference between the Christian right and the Christian left is that the right-wing version fosters a culture of narcissism and is more often led by narcissistic personalities. Naturally, they will frequently accuse their enemies of narcissism — fascists love to accuse their enemies of the very thing they themselves have done.
Thanks to the Nazis, most human beings now accept that racial bigotry is wrong. The same cannot be said for religious bigotry, and it is because of a very basic difference between the two things. Just because you are a given color doesn’t mean that you necessarily must believe it is better than some other color, but you must believe that your religion is superior or else you’d switch to a different religion that you believe is superior. A belief that no religion is superior isn’t really possible, because the metaphysics of different religious/metaphysical positions are wholly incompatible with each other. For example, going to Heaven is not compatible with reincarnation, and neither is compatible with the atheist’s position that “life just ends”. I suppose that you could believe that no religious or metaphysical position is better in the context of truly not caring which one is correct (i.e., belief that the truth is unknowable) but then that would be your superior metaphysical belief.
If we are to make progress against Christian fascists, we must criticize their ideas and, where necessary, directly oppose their dominion.
We now know that plastic recycling doesn’t really work. There are two big problems. The first is that plastics are incredibly diverse in composition; there are at least a thousand different types. These differences are significant, so proper recycling would require us to sort it into different, specific types. The second issue is that plastic recycling costs significantly more than it costs to simply make new plastic. As a result of these two factors, very little plastic is actually ever recycled.
The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
To be clear, most plastic is exported to other countries where it is sorted by people making very little money, and less than half of that probably ends up being recycled. Anything with food in it, for example, is considered to be “contaminated” and is sent to a landfill; it is not cleaned and recycled.
In addition to the recycling problem, there’s also the issue of toxicity. Plastics contain toxic additives which are released during the recycling process, but those toxins are released into our bodies as well through contact with our food. Research indicates that people are ingesting about 5 grams of plastic each week –about the volume of a credit card. Unfortunately, plastic (unlike glass) is not an inert material. In addition to the effects of the physical particles on organisms, they also contain chemicals that are directly harmful to our bodies, like bisphenol-A (BPA), whose effects include:
Cancer
Infertility
Damage to Babies
Reduced Brain Function
Heart Disease
Diabetes
Roughly 81% of Americans have detectable levels of bisphenol-A (BPA) in their urine. Thanks to campaigns bringing attention to the dangers of bisphenol-A, plastic manufacturers have substituted other chemicals, like BPS and BFP, but those may actually be worse. The substitution is based on the schemes of the marketing department, not on medical research.
My perspective on this is that plastics should only be used on durable goods that will not come into contact with foods and then should be considered to be a method of carbon sequestration when those durable plastic goods reach the end of their useful lives (rather than converting it to fuel). Such limits to the use of plastic would dramatically shrink the plastic industry which is worth about $600 billion globally and is expected to increase to $810 billion by 2030. That financial growth will be accompanied by the same relative growth in the amount of plastic waste.
The Atlantic just published a gem of an essay by Elizabeth Bruenig entitled A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future which rails against Americans, generally, for being nihilistic trash. It really resonated with me after spending the last 5 years working against fascism and trying (mostly without success) to get liberals to help with that project. As you might have guessed, Bruenig is focused on the truly horrific massacre of children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; yes, two adults were killed, too, but it is the children that really get to me, and — I expect — you, too. Bruenig’s position is a simple one we’ve heard before, and unlike the position of conservatives, isn’t completely insane — she wants a gun ban.
What I find interesting about the essay, though, is that it is a window into a moment when a smart, but privileged liberal almost sees through to the core problem and her own complicity. The answer is right there at her fingertips, but she doesn’t seem to quite get it. Let’s look at where she missed it. In a paragraph where she explains that Americans have given up on the future, she says, “Some say the planet is dying and we’re already living on borrowed time.” Some say? This isn’t an opinion anymore. Factually, if we keep living like we are living now, the human race will be destroyed, and it is clear that we will keep living like we are living now — there is absolutely no significant political force in the US or the world that can possibly change either of those facts. This should be the heart of any discussion about American nihilism, but Bruenig hasn’t quite gotten there yet.
But she’s almost got it. “American life isn’t about what is good but is rather about nothing at all (which is, at least, broadly inoffensive and inclusive of most tastes and creeds) or about violence itself.” She notes that mass murder is really a subset of gun violence, but doesn’t expand out far enough to realize that everything we are doing is about the destruction of life, and in that context — where literally Earth’s ecosphere is becoming unbalanced and the entire human species will be destroyed along with most other life — that the nihilistic resignation over 19 children murdered is so very small.
The last children born on this planet won’t live very long. They’ll be born to starving mothers who won’t be able to feed them. In a world where there’s no hope, those mothers will have to make the hardest decisions. It’s probably going to be millions of children. Humans don’t really become conscious until another 2 to 5 months after they are born; maybe, those children won’t ever be aware of what’s happening in the world. Their mothers will be. If you tell one of those mothers about the 19 children killed in Uvalde in 2022, she will be bitterly jealous that those children had so many years of happiness before being snuffed out by psychopathy.
The mainstream Democratic party and mainstream Democratic party voters have consistently mocked and marginalized environmentalists. They’re treated like crazy people and nearly all pro-environment Democratic party policies are merely bait to get “the left” to vote Democrat and are immediately shelved as “not pragmatic”. Because, apparently, ending all human life is way more pragmatic. I’m joking, of course — Democrats, like Republicans, do not understand climate change and therefore do not understand the scale of the predicament.
The environment isn’t the only area where Democrats participate in the culture of death, but it is the most important.
To get back to Uvalde, we’re learning more and more about how the cops completely failed. Instead of doing their jobs — in this case, hunting down the killer and ending him — they chose to stay out of range and spent their time pepper spraying parents who were trying to get into the building to save their children. Based on how they keep changing their story, I think we will find that the police significantly contributed to the body count through their cowardice and incompetence. Meanwhile, Joe Biden — the same Joe Biden who does not care about climate change — is refusing to question the actions of police. Interestingly, Fox News is questioning their actions.
Joe Biden is the manifestation of the Democratic Party’s nihilistic resignation just as Donald Trump is the manifestation of the Republican Party’s fascistic rage. If you voted for either in the primary, you voted for the end of humanity. Some of that end will happen through single bullets launched by psychopaths, some of that end will be through huge, systemic processes — but you contributed to both. A vote for Joe Biden in the primary was actively a vote of nihilistic resignation. That vote told the world that you don’t believe humanity can be any better, that it is inevitable that we will end ourselves.
“But if we just got rid of all the guns–“
I honestly don’t know where to start with that because this fantasy of getting rid of the guns isn’t possible. It’s no more possible than my fantasy of not killing all of humanity with climate change. It’s not going to happen, yet it is simple in terms of what is required. I guess we could start at the (theoretically) most easy and obvious idea: Just making people pass an effective background check for all gun transfers. My reading of the data indicates that this might essentially end school massacres, specifically. However, this misses the whole point where 30% of American adults are actively hallucinating some kind of global conspiracy of non-white people (helmed by Jewish people or possibly Satanists) and have concluded that only multiple genocides will make the world right again. In that context, you are not going to achieve universal background checks. I mean — if you stop allowing dangerous people to buy guns, then how will the Patriots cleanse the nation?
The people who want to give up have been coming up with some really sad “solutions” lately. Dissolving the union — separating the United States into blocks of either red or blue states — is a recurring theme. There’s even talk of relocating people who are in a state of the wrong color relative to their views. This is not going to work. Even if you were to achieve the breakup, the fascists won’t be stopped from coming for you. Moreover, the Democratic Party isn’t that much better than the Republican Party in practice, human rights violations will continue in the red states, the red states would be financially devastated without the flow of tax money from blue to red and would blame the new blue nations, the red states would likely have nukes and a much bigger military. There’s only one way to deal with fascists — you have to fight them.
The Democratic Party is not willing to fight them because they are the party of nihilistic resignation. If you don’t fight fascists, they will inevitably destroy you. “It’s just not practical” is the refrain of the song sung by the resigning nihilist. One of the verses goes, “That’s utopian!” Literally, any suggestion for improving the world is utopian to the resigning nihilist.
Do you want to end violence?
First, end poverty. We can do that any time we want to. Americans just don’t want to because they are equal parts cynical cowards and enraged fascists. Both halves are sprinkled with narcissism.
Third, ensure that everyone has mental health services and medical care.
Fourth, end state violence. You do realize that most police are fascists and the rest are quite literally going along with fascism, right? You saw how useful police were in Uvalde, right? Though I certainly would not suggest that we completely defund the police today, in the long term, the police are a waste of money at best and truly counterproductive.
There you go. You’ve ended violence. It was much easier (and therefore more pragmatic) than getting rid of all the guns!
It’s fairly obvious that American fascists are using an effective diversity of tactics to bring down the dominant (liberal) society in the US, including terrorist acts by shock troops, hamstringing the US legislature, and undoing democracy via the Supreme Court. Yesterday, we discovered that the 5th Circuit Court is also occupied by fascists. I’ll let liberal darling and extremely well-informed person (not sarcasm) Heather Cox Richardson explain:
There was big news [Wednesday] from a quarter that made it easily overlooked. In a decision about the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to judge those accused of engaging in securities fraud, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that “Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide an intelligible principle by which the SEC would exercise the delegated power, in violation of Article I’s vesting of ‘all’ legislative power in Congress….”
Basically, the SEC was created to protect the majority of Americans from bad behavior by wealthy capitalists. Ironically, it actually protects the institution of capitalism by preventing some of that bad behavior. The idea of an “intelligible principle” being necessary to allow Congress to delegate is part of a right-wing strategy called “nondelegation doctrine”. More from HCR:
What is at stake with this decision is something called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government since the New Deal have been housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state. … As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.”
The nondelegation doctrine was specifically invented by big business after the New Deal* to fight back against it. The idea is that the regulation required to counter the bad behavior of big business is so complex, that it must be delegated to the executive branch for that regulation to be possible. It would simply take too long for Congress to vote on every little thing. By trying to prevent delegation, the far right intends to end regulation itself. The regulation would still exist, but powerful people would be able to ignore it. The left agrees that delegation sometimes goes too far (see, for example, the ATF), but it is clear that a great deal of delegation to the executive branch is necessary for this form of society (capitalism/liberalism) to function.
I’ve written at length about how fascists don’t really care about capitalism. So, while the nondelegation doctrine was the brainchild of big business in the 1930’s, today’s fascists pushing this idea want to use it to allow them to build fascism — not capitalism — though if a capitalist monopoly happens to benefit a straight, white, nominally Christian, cis man, they’ll take it happily. Certainly people like Elon Musk who want to simultaneously hobble the government’s ability to make him behave and also use the government as his personal servant are happy to go along with this, but it is the full-on fascists — who will dispose of Musk as soon as it is advantageous to do so — who are really behind this now.
The 5th Circuit Court has taken the hint from the Supreme Court that it no longer needs to be concerned with liberal precedent, and that allows it to let its fascist flag fly. Decisions at the 5th Circuit might simply stand as they are, but it is more likely that they will be sent up to the fascist-controlled Supreme Court which will then solidify them into a new far-right precedent for the entire country.
It’s hard not to be dramatic about the results of all this, so let me start out slowly. In contrast to this fascist approach to change — where they simply burn everything down and laugh maniacally — an anarchist approach would be to construct democratic institutions that are parallel and redundant and then burn down the more authoritarian structures that no longer serve a purpose. The fascist approach is a purposeful introduction of complete chaos into American society in order to leverage that chaos to grab power and destroy their perceived enemies.
I think it bears repeating that capitalism requires a certain amount of order to function. We’ve seen what the introduction of just a little virus can do, and we’ve seen what a war on the other side of the planet can do (many times). The end of all federal government regulation is a much bigger disruption. You may have noticed that Republicans never have a plan for what will replace the liberal order — their only plan is to destroy it. They do not have a plan except for the glorious freedom to destroy people that they hate.
What we are looking at, then, is a period of time where society works less and less to provide the things people need to survive while different groups of people take turns being actively destroyed, one way or another. Often times, that destruction will be an ironic revenge for the material misery that fascists caused themselves; fascists always blame their enemies for their own problems, regardless of how absurd it is to do so. The worse things get, the more human beings fascists will destroy.
There used to be this problem called “worm milk”; milk is hard to process and distribute safely because it is really good at growing nasty stuff, and capitalists were not willing to put forth the effort required to do it safely. The baby formula shortage is a return to that because the big factory that was creating 40% of America’s baby formula (the Abbott factory in Michigan) had been allowed to continue getting more and more gross until it produced formula that was deadly to infants due to a bacteria called Cronobacter sakazakii growing in it. So, worm milk. The “worms” aren’t literal — worm in this case just means something nasty growing in the milk.
The baby formula situation is more complicated than this one thing, and obviously, the FDA has been more and more weakened — and controlled by big business — over time (though, without the FDA, the factory would still be killing babies). My point is that regulation is required in a situation where capitalists — who are operating as if selfishness is a virtue — are in charge. Fascists go beyond the ambivalent evil of “selfishness as virtue” and crank it up to “harming others as virtue”.
We’re talking about a world where there is worm milk, but also gangs of fascists (not just individuals) going to places where their enemies congregate and murdering them for fun — and the police do nothing because the social pressure to get them to enforce some kind of justice is gone and replaced with social pressure to let fascists do what they want. Half the time, the gang of fascists contains the police; sometimes, those police are in uniform and on the clock.
And not just worm milk. Randomly, there is worm meat, worm cheese, worm bread; you have to decide whether you can afford to throw it out. But that’s not all: Tap water that makes you sick. Bottled water that also makes you sick. Surprise! The filters** you just bought actually introduce lead and arsenic into the water! You’ll never know why your family is sick, though, because you can’t get in to see a real doctor. You end up seeing a fake doctor instead who prescribes chiropractic medicine and crystals for your mysterious malady. Without a functioning Department of Labor to stop them, your employer reduces your hourly rate; occasionally, they just decide not to pay you. If you try to organize your coworkers to demand fair pay, it turns out that it is cheaper for your employer to hire some cops to beat you. If you’re the leader, you might not make it home at all. These are all real problems that were dramatically diminished by regulations and the administrative state.
Rome wasn’t built in a day; it also didn’t collapse in a day — it took hundreds of years. The US collapse is quite fast in comparison and has been going on for a while. But hey! Look at all the freedom that is going to happen! Fascists are definitely going to have a lot more freedom. I hope we’re all starting to appreciate what “freedom” means when it comes out of the mouth of a fascist.
*The New Deal was created by democratic socialists, who represent the center of politics from a liberal/capitalist perspective. They balance the needs of the working class with the desires of the wealthy, and thereby both protect working class people and the institution of capitalism itself by preventing its abject failure. Because democratic socialism protects capitalism, some leftists (Red Guard, for example) hate it immensely.
**While filters having lead and arsenic in them is not specific problem we’ve seen, we’ve certainly seen lead, arsenic, and other dangerous substances appear in various products in such a way that people are poisoned. Thanks to regulation and the administrative state, those problems are discovered, publicized and corrected.
Monday night, I attended a vigil for the victims of the terrorist attack in Buffalo that killed 10 people and injured 3 more (one seriously). The organizers felt that asking for justice for the victims was appropriate; even though they certainly weren’t wrong about that, it seems extremely unlikely that anything resembling justice can happen. What is justice in this context? Whatever it might be doesn’t seem like something a humane society can deliver, and there’s certainly no making up for the loss of those 10 human beings.
Several people, including me, attended the vigil with the primary purpose of preventing the next fascist from killing Black people and their allies at this vigil — because fascists see every place where their perceived enemies might congregate as an opportunity for murder, whether it be a vigil, funeral, protest, place of worship, grocery store, or school.
Fascists are at war with the rest of the country, but most of the rest of the country refuses to acknowledge it. In fact, at this vigil last night, a handful of the moms who demand action against civilian gun ownership showed up in their t-shirts — a display that was both cringey and nonsensical. Civilian disarmament is impossible in the US as long as it means disarming the fascists who make up at least one third of adults. America’s police forces are at least half fascists (the terrorist in Buffalo was excited to talk to them because he thinks they are on his side — and he may be right!), so even if civilian disarmament were possible, it would mean that fascists would control all the guns. If you would like to simply keep guns out of the hands of right-wing lunatics, well, I hate to break it to you, but these are exactly the people that Republicans want to be armed. We are at war, and the lunatics are the shock troops.
If there were no fascists, we could have a conversation about getting rid of the guns — the how, the who, the why — but until then, it’s an absurd topic.
It’s hard to say when this current war started. If we take a long view of history, this is a continuation of the Civil War which technically ended in 1865 but started up again a mere 8 years later when the white liberals of that time decided they were too cowardly and complacent to continue resisting the southern fascists’ pushback against democracy. You could point to Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign, but there were other points of acceleration, such as the Tea Party movement which started prior to 1990, but became truly invigorated in 2009 in response to Barack Obama’s election. The rhetoric of “socialism” and “replacement” date back to 1870 and have been around continuously; sure, the volume of the wailing varies as does the extent to which fascist arguments are shrouded in dog whistles, but these are the exact same ideas. Those ideas crossed the Atlantic to Nazi Germany, and then came back again, enhanced. Even the Red Scare was rooted in these same ideas from the Civil War era.
Here we are though, at war against fascists within our own country, but with most Americans either denying the war or enthusiastically supporting it. What does President Joe have to say about it? Reports in the media say that he called for “unity” and more gun control. I haven’t been able to find a transcript, but I did see that he condemned the idea of white supremacy during his speech. Is condemning the idea of fascism enough? There are specific people who are building fascism. They have names. For the time being, we can see who they are when they rail against “CRT” (teaching children accurate history), trans people, the immigration “crisis” (i.e., normal immigration), “socialism” (capitalism that isn’t controlled by white supremacists), “handouts” (programs to balance the needs of working class people against the tyranny of capitalism), and fuel efficiency standards (because creating less CO2 makes us weak, apparently). We are at war, and the President of the United States won’t even say who we are at war with. I can only hope that he will do that during his speech Tuesday night…
He called it terrorism and he called it white supremacy. That’s certainly good and accurate. He connected the terrorist attack in Buffalo to the tiki-torch nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 — that’s good and accurate as well. He says that we need to “keep assault weapons off our streets” — a common Democratic Party refrain that started out odd and has become more and more absurd. Mostly, he talked about rejecting hate, and he said that the white supremacist, insurrectionist, fascist psychos are a minority, which is technically correct — but it is still a third of US adults. It is a huge number of people and just “rejecting hate” isn’t going to cut it.
He didn’t admit that we’re at war and he didn’t explicitly identify who we are at war with. No surprise there.
The Democratic Party can’t really respond properly to fascism because it is a near-right institution that depends on the acceptance of a moderate amount of fascism to protect it from true democracy. The Democratic Party villainizes economic centrists like Bernie Sanders as “extreme” even while it pretends to work with them. It spends more money fighting against progressives than it does fighting against Republicans, and it is more willing to use any means necessary to win when fighting progressives. If electoral politics is the only lever of change that you feel comfortable touching, then I encourage you to not only vote out the Republicans (who are all but openly fascist at this point) but also vote out the Democratic Party’s old guard because they are the protectors of a kinder, gentler fascism and the obstacle that prevents electoral progress.
Biden claims he was inspired to run for President in 2020 because of the fascists at Charlottesville — as if he is somehow the only person who could meet this challenge. It’s laughable considering that his response is “reject hate and take away everyone’s guns”; it’s like just saying no to drugs, only more pathetic. Accepting that we are at war with fascism and accepting the responsibility to fight against it in those terms is literally the least we should allow from our elected representatives. There was exactly one candidate for President that said that they would go to “war with white nationalism and racism”. That person was not Joe Biden.
